16 Cool Responsive WordPress Plugins for Images and Videos

16 Cool Responsive WordPress Plugins for Images and Videos

Ensuring that your site looks good, loads fast and is easy to navigate is great. It becomes essential when users view it on the smaller screens of their mobile devices. Using a responsive WordPress theme is one way to ensure that your content adapts to those screens.

However, sometimes media stubbornly refuses to resize itself properly to fit those smaller screens. If media on your site is not resizing properly when viewing on smaller screens, you’re gonna love these responsive WordPress plugins!

Each is available free from the WordPress plugin repository, and some have premium versions with additional features. Check ’em out and have a play with a few of them. You’re sure to find something that will fit the bill for you. If you know of other responsive WordPress plugins that are not listed here, by all means, include a link to them in the comments. Have fun!

This is hands down the best slider plugin I’ve ever seen, and I’ll be writing a post all about it soon! The UI of this plugin is powered by Adobe Air (if it’s not already installed on your computer, the plugin will launch the install wizard for you). You can even create sliders within sliders by categorizing the images you add; tabs are added at the top of your slider so users can switch views instantly!

Now fully responsive, Slidedeck 2 enables you to add dynamically updating content to your sliders from over a dozen sources like YouTube, Twitter & Google, even RSS feeds. With 9 different slider themes and several dozen options for each, you have unparalleled customization potential. It also includes a widget, so you can add sliders to your sidebar (remember to set a custom width), or any other widget-ready area of your site.

This is one of my favorites. Once you’ve set up the general settings, you can easily override them for individual slideshows by specifying whatever metadata you need. You can customize and display multiple slideshows using shortcodes or widgets, or in any theme template. Each slideshow is automatically attributed a unique ID, so styling with CSS is a breeze too.

With this freebie, you can create an infinite number of responsive image sliders with an infinite number of images in each slider with a few clicks of your mouse. Multiple sliders on the same page is not a problem either. There is also a premium version available that gets you access to a few cool addons.

This one takes a novel approach to building sliders. You create your sliders on your computer, then upload them to your WordPress install. Once uploaded, simply add a unique shortcode wherever you want a slider to display. It comes with a few uniquely cool transition effects too; check ’em out in the demos.

Plus, you have the option of including sliders with template tags or shortcodes. According to the plugin developer, this is probably the best free jQuery slider/slideshow plugin for WordPress. If it does the job you need done, then you be the judge!

Along with a drag-and-drop interface, this plugin leverages the built-in features of WordPress: it uses custom post types for the slideshow, custom fields to store settings, and the media uploader for the images. You can also create your own custom slider templates, and add them to a folder in your theme so they don’t disappear when you update the plugin.

This plugin allows you to easily attach a single video to any post, page or custom post type with a shortcode. Or add multiple instances of the Video Widget to any sidebar(s). Both display types are fully responsive and fast loading. There is one drawback with this plugin: videos do not display in category archives. If this is important to you, it may not be your best choice.

This uber-simple plugin has no settings page. It simply overrides the max-width for embeds in “Settings” > “Media”. One of the neatest things about it is that it fetches meta via YouTube and Vimeo APIs to ensure that videos maintain their original aspect ratio, with no black bars. And you can use the shortcode, with a bit of CSS savvy, to display selected videos in a nice grid if you like.

This plugin adds “YouTube” and “Vimeo” events to Google analytics, so you can easily track user interaction on your site. It’s also the fastest one I’ve tested: it only loads the video’s default image and a play icon. The video is only loaded once it’s clicked. You can also set any video to start at a specific time, so your users can skip those annoying ads!

A bit different than other plugins in this roundup, this one enables you to overlay an image on every video. You can use the included images, or upload your own to brand your content. The result is that not only do they become responsive, your site is much faster because the video only loads when it’s clicked.

Unlike most of the plugins included here, this one does not generate sliders. Instead, it applies your custom breakpoints to all images on your WordPress site (you define the viewport widths and associated images sizes you want). All images will display according to the viewport size of the device being used to view your content. However, this plugin may not affect images that have already been uploaded; you may need to upload them again for the responsive attributes to be applied.

You can try out all the pro features in the free version. The plugin just won’t let you deploy a slider with pro features enabled unless you’ve paid for a license. All info can be found here though: http://www.dwuser.com/easyrotator/pro-info/

They are, after all, using the oldest and most effective marketing ploy around: make it real easy to get the free version, which includes the pro features that you can play around with (and get hooked). But… wanna use ’em? Gotta buy ’em. :)

Just thought I’d add a contribution (6 months later.) I just wrote a widget for responsively scaled, exactly proportional images. Basically it sets up a frame for the image in whatever rational scale you need, and then sets the desired image as a background — an easy way to add images of exactly the same (not necessarily square) proportions without needing to crop, etc. It’s here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-image-widget/